Pane toscano

A bread made without salt

Pane toscano is the bread of Tuscany, and the first thing anyone says about it is what it leaves out. It contains no salt. That is why it is also called pane sciocco, 'bland bread', or pane sciapo. The flour is soft wheat, type 0, ideally from Tuscany; the leaven is natural sourdough, lievito madre; the rest is water. The protected specification allows no additives, processing aids or preservatives.

On 1 May 2016 the bread received protected designation of origin from the EU member states' quality committee, described as the first DOP given to a regional bakery product in Europe. The microbial culture that leavens DOP loaves is kept in the laboratories of the University of Pisa's Faculty of Agriculture on behalf of the producers' consortium.

The specification describes the loaf closely. It is made as a filoncino, a diamond-shaped loaf of 450 to 550 g, or as a filone, a rectangular loaf with rounded corners weighing 900 to 1,100 g or 1,800 to 2,200 g, between 5 and 12 cm thick. The crust is crisp and friable, a dark matte hazelnut colour. The crumb is white or ivory with irregular holes, the aroma is of toasted hazelnut, and the taste is unsalted and slightly acidic. Moisture may not exceed 30% of the weight.

Why there is no salt: four explanations, none documented

Nobody knows for certain why Tuscan bakers stopped salting their bread, and the accounts that circulate are stories rather than records. The best known puts the cause in the twelfth-century wars between Florence and the maritime republic of Pisa. Pisa controlled the ports through which salt reached central Tuscany and, as the story goes, cut off the supply, so farmers and city families baked without it. A second version blames taxes: Florence taxed everyday urban activities with gabelle, the tax eventually reached salt, and the bakers were said to be the first to rebel by leaving it out.

A third explanation is about taste. Tuscan cooking is strongly flavoured, with cured meats, salted cheeses and robust stews, and an unsalted loaf balances them. One account finds this the least persuasive of the four. It finds the political explanation the most credible, because unsalted bread is not made across all of Tuscany: Massa and Carrara, Pisa and Lucca, which lay outside the Grand Duchy, traditionally baked salted bread. Unsalted loaves also turn up in parts of Umbria and in some areas of Lazio, which a single-event story about Pisa does not explain.

Wheat country and a long baking tradition

Tuscany was a granary of the Roman empire, a point Livy makes, and bread stayed central to its towns. In 1239 Pope Gregory IX's rule for the Order of the Tau at Altopascio recommended white bread for the sick, and the town became known as a Città del Pane. By the sixteenth century the bakers of Prato had a reputation of their own. In 1596 Giovanni Miniati wrote of bread sellers at the Florentine market calling 'Prato!' to advertise their loaves, and the Medici chose a Prato baker to supply the Villa Medicea di Poggio a Caiano.

The shape is older than the designation. Miniatures illustrating Boccaccio's Decameron in the fourteenth century show a loaf with the diamond form of the modern filoncino.

The sourdough and the long rise

The leaven is lievito madre, a stiff sourdough kept alive by refreshing. The method is two-stage: a small first dough, the biga, is made with the starter and left to ripen, then a part of it goes into the final dough. The designated production method starts the biga from 1 kg of flour, 500 ml of water, 200 g of lievito madre and wheat germ, rests it at least 8 hours, and then builds the final dough from 1 kg of flour, 550 g of water and 200 g of biga. The dough is kneaded by hand or machine and rested at least 20 minutes before dividing; the pieces rest 15 minutes more, are shaped, and rise at least 2.5 hours before baking.

The home version here is scaled down and slower. Its biga is 120 g of flour, 80 ml of water and 30 g of starter, left 10 to 12 hours until it has doubled and shows bubbles on the surface. The dough is 550 g of flour, 320 ml of water and 230 g of that biga, worked by hand for about 10 minutes, risen until doubled, folded, and left a further 8 hours under a cloth. The whole process takes about 22 hours of rising for a loaf of about 1 kg. The home recipe is a separate published version and is not a claim of equivalence to the protected specification, whose own quantities and controls are the ones given above.

The oven, the bake and the bread chest

Tuscan farmhouses, the case coloniche, were often far from any town and baked in their own wood-fired ovens, unlike the South, where large shared ovens were common. The home recipe approximates that heat with a static domestic oven: 240 °C for the first 5 minutes, then 180 °C for 55 minutes, finishing for the last 5 minutes directly on the rack with the door slightly open so steam can leave.

At home the bread lived in the madia, the bread chest, which Leon Battista Alberti called the cassa del pane in his treatise on building. Because an unsalted loaf of this kind stays soft and moist, it could be eaten over about a week. Wrapped in cloth or in a paper bag the home loaf keeps at room temperature for 5 to 6 days.

How it is eaten

The loaf is mild on purpose. It is served with finocchiona, pecorino and goat cheese, including as an aperitivo snack, where the cured meat and cheese supply the salt that the bread does not. Its second life begins when it goes stale. Stale bread is central to Tuscan cooking and goes into ribollita, the bread and vegetable soup; pappa al pomodoro; panzanella; carabaccia; cacciucco; and several kinds of crostini, among them chicken liver, spleen and black cabbage.

Handling raw flour

Flour is a raw food and can carry harmful bacteria. Do not taste the dough before baking; keep flour and unbaked dough separate from ready-to-eat foods, and wash hands, utensils, bowls, pans and work surfaces after handling. FDA guidance supports these flour-handling precautions but does not assess or validate this bread's fermentation schedule.